Oh and BTW, what's "Atomic" about the Atomic Lantern?

Notice how so many of these late-night Only Available on TV products are sold as "military grade" by scruffy guys with tough voices who I'm pretty sure are all trying to convince us that they are veterans of Operation Desert Storm and not serial killers?  The guy in this ad "needs" a tough "lantern" (i.e. flashlight) because he has this habit of tossing them into the back of his pickup truck and driving for several seconds through rough terrain before stopping and using it again.  Jeesh, why not just leave it in the front seat with you, moron?

Anyway, this "lantern"- which is just four sets of LED lights made in China- is available for $19.99 with free shipping, and if that isn't good enough to get you rushing to your phone, you can get a seconed one "for just an extra fee."  I really hope that the "extra fee" is another $19.99, because that would be hilarious- "you can get a SECOND Atomic Lantern for just double the price of one!  WOW!"

Anyway, the weird psychopath who likes to toss it into the back of his otherwise-practically-empty pickup before driving another twenty yards really likes it, plus you can encase it in ice or blind the fish in your aquarium with it, so I guess that's pretty cool.  Except I found another guy on Youtube who tells me that the only difference between this Atomic Lantern and the electric lanterns you can buy at Big Lots for $5 is that the Atomic Lantern is black and the ones at Big Lots are orange.  Hmm.

April 15 can't come fast enough...another stupid tax prep ad.....

Let's just ignore the fact that the only way that this guy knows how to research online tax preparation services is to use three laptops.  Because "New Window" is just not a thing in this guy's universe.  Whatever.

I'm more irritated at the thought that the guy in this ad can afford a nice house and three laptop computers, but he's spending his weekend looking for an online service that will do his income taxes for free.  Ugh, talk about penny-wise and pound foolish.  He's the kind of clown who is going to end up using LegalZoom to write up his Last Will and Testament because.....well, it's the cheapest option.

Moron.

Cookie Do. Less Solution, More Problem

Maybe the only thing the fattest nation on the planet needs more than another McRib season:  the perfect dessert to grab on the way home from another trip through the Taco Bell drive-thru.

Remember when eating cookie dough was something little kids did when there was some left in the bowl mom had used to mix it to....you know, make cookies?  Remember when eating large amounts of raw cookie dough was something comedy show writers imagined that heartbroken young women and single young men did because they were damaged or just plain infantile?

Of course, those were the days when watching hour after hour of television was seen as the last refuge of the friendless loser.  Today we buy cable packages which allow us to record thousands of hours so we never, never have to STOP watching tv, and gazing at it while sitting on buses or walking down the street is seen as perfectly normal, even desirable.  So, overflowing waffle cones stuffed with cookie dough?  Just par for the course.

I'm buying stock in pharmacutical companies that specialize in insulin tomorrow.  My comfy retirement is assured.

It's a Glade Air Freshener commercial. I'm not kidding.

No, seriously.  All this crap is here to sell you one of those things you buy to cover up the fact that you don't clean the bathroom as often as you really should.  I expect the woman in this ad to be entering the mystical, magical land of Lysol pretty soon, because spraying a house with chemicals is also easier than lugging out the freaking vacuum and mop.

This is just plain bizarre.

"What's Important" according to PNC Insurance....

Turns out that ninety percent of this advertisement is dad's fantasy of what his daughter's wedding will look like (and cost.)  He's daydreaming about his little girl's wedding day as he stares at her sitting on her bed.  The little girl looks to to be around six or so, meaning that wedding date is a little while off, but considering the scope of the wedding he's imagining I guess it makes sense for him to start saving now.

So when this guy looks at his little daughter and thinks of the future, he doesn't imagine his little girl graduating from Law School or starting her own business or traveling the world or writing the Great American Novel.  Nope.  Today she's his daughter, but someday she'll be somebody's wife, and she'll be out of his house (maybe he's just fantasizing about what he can do with the room once she's been handed off?)  That day of transition will come with a big, beautiful and very expensive party, but it will come.  And when it does, it will include all the stupid stereotypical showy frilly bells and whistles dad can afford.  So if he wants to show well to his neighbors and the family of the Appropriately Male and White Groom, he'd better open that investment account right now.

College?  Meh, whatever.  Maybe later, if he's got time and money and if he ever gets around to seeing his daughter as something more than a princess in a fairy story getting whisked off by her Prince Charming.  Hell, I'll be happy if he just stops staring at her and imagining her on her wedding night.  Stop that, creepy dad!

Bud Light Presents: Spuds Mackenzie, and another illustration of why I mute the Superbowl Commercials

In this truly reprehensible take on A Christmas Carol, an ugly young man who decides that he's just going to stay home and not spend yet another night drinking cheap, crappy watered-down beer with his loser friends is shown the error of his ways by the ghost of a done-to-death advertising campaign from the 1980s.

After admitting that he "has no excuse" for why he doesn't feel like yakking it up with the dumbass clueless idiots who try to fill every free moment of their lives with pointless blather and alcohol, the ghost of Spuds Mackenzie (remember him?  Me too.  Miss him?  Me neither) dangles before him and takes him on a journey of discovery in which it's revealed that while he has been hanging out at home, his friends have been busy being stupid at bars and bad neighbors in the suburbs.  If only he had made better choices, he could have been there when the illiterate morons he used to hang with couldn't finish a common phrase to win a trivia contest!  If only he had not blown off that party at his Nameless Friend's house, they wouldn't have run out of Bud Light, causing Rudy to fail to score with Suzy.  Or causing Suzy to make it home safely instead of driving her Kia into that van of kids trying to get home from the movies.  He could at LEAST joined in the fun when Bob got into that fight with the police officer who came to issue the noise complaint.  Or something.

At no point is it even suggested that this guy's friends really care one whit whether he's there or not, by the way.  They seem to be having a great time without him- probably because, despite the ad's tagline, it really is all about the beer, not the friendship.  We don't see them mourning his absence.  Nobody offers a toast to him and wonders why he became such a weirdo who wants to do something other than hang out and drink even when he doesn't have an "excuse."  They are just One Idiot Short, and that seems to be just fine with them.

Anyway, thanks to the dangling spirit of the Bud Light mascot, our Hero realizes what a terrible mistake he's been making whenever he's decided that he just doesn't feel like spending another evening drinking garbage with his drooling idiot friends.  So from now on he'll be there, and those friends will notice because he has the trivia answer and he brought another case of Bud Light-- and that's about it.   Pretty sad.

(Go Patriots.)

Verizon's "Half House" commercial makes NO sense

I suffered through this entire stupid commercial because I thought that at the end, the message would be "if you live in a space only half the size of the average house, a lot of companies will make you full price, and that's not fair.  But Verizon doesn't charge you for more than you get, so if you live in half a house, we only charge you half THEIR price...."

Instead, the whole "half-house" thing seems to be completely pointless.  Yes, these idiots live in "half a house," for whatever reason.  But Verizon doesn't discriminate against them "just" because they live in "half a house"- Verizon treats them exactly the way they treat their customers who live in normal, full-sized houses (or the kind of houses that exist on tv- massive, gleaming mansions.)  Verizon charges the half-house people every bit as much for cable as they charge people who live in those full-houses.  Um, yay Verizon?

(By the way, the "half-house" shown here is still bigger than my apartment, which is connected to the outside world by Verizon for a fee that makes me feel like I live in a big house...um, thanks again, Verizon?)